Death By Lynch Mob Was A Tragic Fact In Area

When the U.S. Senate atoned for not doing more to stop the practice, it apologized to victims who once lived here.

The mob yanked Reuben Cole from his jail cell in July 1887, hanged him from a tree near the Surry County Courthouse, then blamed him for his own murder.

Cole was a black man accused of raping a white woman -- his guilt presumed by most white citizens. He also had the audacity to switch courts and postpone his trial until November, as the law allowed.

The Richmond Dispatch reported that Cole might have lived longer if his trial occurred immediately. Even then, though, Cole might have died in a lynch mob's grasp, the newspaper said, if a jury settled on a mild punishment -- a prison sentence, instead of death.

The U.S. Senate apologized Monday to Cole and at least 4,742 other victims of mob action for not passing federal legislation to outlaw lynching -- despite plenty of chances in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Virginian senators -- such as Claude A. Swanson, Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd -- joined their Southern colleagues to thwart seven presidential petitions and three measures passed by the House of Representatives in support of a federal ban on lynching.

"White Southerners viewed anti-lynching legislation as the thin edge of the wedge," said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina who has written several books on lynching. "If you let that in, the federal government can come in and start messing with race relations in the South."

Lynchings occurred in all states except four New England ones and happened to blacks and whites, but most lynch mobs formed in the South to kill black men.

Of the former Confederate states, Virginia had the fewest lynchings -- 100 between 1882 and 1968, Tuskegee University reports. Within the state, fewer lynchings occurred in eastern Virginia than in most other regions. Historians caution, though, that many lynchings were likely never reported.

Still, the specter of racial violence lurked. Local black families read news articles about lynchings in other states. They knew friends or relatives hanged, shot and mutilated in other states.

Perhaps they knew Cole's family. Or perhaps their parents or grandparents told them about William Allen -- a black man, accused of killing a white man with a knife, who was pulled from his cell in December 1881 and hanged near the courthouse of what was then Warwick County.

"The violence did not have to happen to shape lives," Brundage said. Brundage generally attributes Virginia's fewer documented lynchings to politics and economics.

Virginia's politicians and business leaders advocated law and order and upheld white supremacy without inflaming racial prejudices into violent acts.

Unlike those in other Southern states, Virginia's economy didn't rest on a staple crop, such as cotton, harvested by poor black sharecroppers for wealthy white planters. No population boom in larger cities led black and white laborers to fight for land and jobs.

In 1928, Virginia became the first Southern state to pass an anti-lynching law. Louis Jaffe, editor of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, won a Pulitzer Prize for his campaign to end lynching and to pass the law.

The law's political support had little to do with ensuring that black people got a fair trial, said Melvin Patrick Ely, a history professor at the College of William and Mary. Rather, it was an attempt to reinforce official law-and-order authority and to undercut demand for federal legislation.

The law was never used to punish white people for lynching black people, said historian J. Douglas Smith, who wrote "Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia."

No other lynching occurred in the state after the law's passage, but Smith listed several instances where critics questioned coroners' rulings.

Given such history, Ely sees merit in a Senate apology that he considers decades overdue.

"An apology doesn't bring back the dead or make a wrong right," Ely said, "but there's value in a society admitting its flaws -- considering that the alternative is ignoring the wrongs of the past." *

IT HAPPENED IN VIRGINIA

The state had 100 lynchings reported between 1882 and 1968, Tuskegee University reports. Historians say many other lynchings probably weren't reported. For brief accounts of three lynchings in Newport News, Surry County and the former Warwick County*

LOCAL LYNCHINGS

Brief accounts of three reported lynchings that occurred locally:

1881: A masked mob yanks William Allen out of his jail cell and hangs him from a tree near the courthouse of what was then Warwick County. Allen was a black man accused of killing William Sclater, who was white, with a knife. Allen had denied committing the crime, and the weapon wasn't found.

1887: A mob of 50 to 75 pulls Reuben Cole out of his jail cell in July and hangs him from a tree near the Surry County Courthouse. Cole was a black man accused of raping a white woman. The lynching occurred after he asked for a circuit court trial in November, instead of an immediate trial before the county court.

1900: A growing mob nabs Walter W. Watts, a white man, from his Newport News Jail cell and drags him to the house of the white woman he was accused of raping. He's shot 11 times and hanged in woods on the city's outskirts. The next morning, hundreds of people flock to see the body. A jury later indicts one of nearly 75 witnesses for murder -- Ben Chandler, who had fled the city.

Sources: Richmond Dispatch; Virginian-Pilot; and "Lynching in the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930," by W. Fitzhugh Brundage *